Beware Plastic Shaman
So some hafu white girl from Everett with a BA in farming calling herself an Ainu shaman wants to show up to Seattle and tell the BIPOC community what’s up. What’s a hometown kid to do?
What’s the sitch? Here’s the short version
Myself, and members and elders of the Wakkotan and Atuy Kotan spoke with Marika Clymer on November 28, 2020. It was after this and these online interactions that we concluded that Marika Clymer speaks with no educational or experiential position of authority, has no respect for individual kotan or personal protocols, disrespects the hierarchy structure of our kotan, and spits in the face of our kamuinomi.
Within my unarpe’s Ainu In Diaspora group she has stepped in front of elders and knowledge keepers assuming positions of authority with no prior discussion, nor consent of the group runners.
Marika Clymer told us that she holds an Ainuic haplotype, and that someone told her she was special, and she is using this as justification to sell herself as a tourist minstrel Ainu without she herself having to experience the same financial and socio-economical burdens our Utari in Ainu Moshiri have to endure under direct colonization to survive and thrive through heritage craftwork.
This was an issue I had regarded as a semi-private inter-community issue, but Marika’s public financial exploitation of Ainuic heritage has put me in the position to either make a public statement, or be seen as quietly approving of her activities.
As an ambiguously Asian woman she has chosen to Orientalize herself as a “shaman” and grift an under educated Western audience who wants to buy off their white guilt for $1800
Marika Clymer walks like a colonizer and works like an information poaching culture-vulture. She has taken things my community educated her on, and presented them on her platforms without mention or credit of her sources to present herself as a gatekeeper of Indigenous secrets.
